In 1951, the first time the University of Connecticut’s basketball team played in Madison Square Garden, more than 3,000 students went to the game on a special train chartered to take them from nearby Willimantic to New York.Last Friday, when UConn played again in the legendary sports arena, there was also a special train, announced by none other than Gov. Dannel Malloy, but it went from not quite nearby New Haven and it was primarily for the convenience of fans who could pay for the $489 to $4,740 seats. Those who could pay $12,500 a ticket for club sideline seats probably flew in on gossamer wings. But the students were not forgotten — completely. A special lottery was held for them and 200 students won the right pay $150 to $200 to see their college team play in the Garden’s legendary nosebleed seats, convenient to the rafters. The mention of the train for 3,000 Storrs residents from Willimantic is a reminder that college basketball and football were once meant primarily for students to watch fellow students play other students. While all this transportation and ticketing news was being reported in the east, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago ruled that Northwestern University football players are employees of the university and therefore have the right to form a union and bargain collectively for pay and other benefits.Imagine that. Young men who spend 50 hours a week or more practicing and playing a sport in return for tuition and room and board, awarded for their athletic, not their academic skills, are employees of the university. Or, if you want to imagine that closer to home, students who perform before an audience willing to pay $450 or $4,750 or $12,500 to watch them play basketball for 40 minutes, plus time outs, should be paid for their work.This was a ruling by one NLRB official and it will be exhaustively appealed by the university and the college sports governing body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA is the inventor of the term, “student athletes” for the players who make up the minor leagues for professional basketball and football.u u uAs college basketball and football grew into a $16 billion industry, there has been growing sentiment for paying those who do most of the work. The NCAA amusingly insists that these players are amply rewarded with scholarships worth upwards of $40,000 a year and are only too delighted to play for the honor of alma mater, even though many leave for the pros as soon as they are legally able.That 1951 game in the Garden, which UConn lost to St. John’s, marked the university’s first sojourn into what The Hartford Courant called “big time basketball,” the NCAA Tournament. In those days, UConn’s football and basketball teams played mostly New England teams in what was known as the Yankee Conference and their longest trips were to communities like Orono, Maine — by bus.The home games were played at home, of all places. The basketball games were in an old fashioned, ramshackle field house — there was no Gampel Pavilion then and no arena in Hartford — and the football games were in a stadium at a place called the campus. This primitive arrangement did not survive the 20th century and now, home basketball games are divided between the campus and Hartford and for the football team, home is East Hartford.u u uEven with three NCAA championships in the past 15 years, UConn basketball hasn’t exactly been a financial success either. Data from the U.S. Department of Education for the five-year period ending in 2010, very successful years for the basketball program, shows an aggregate profit of $4.6 million, compared to rivals like Louisville, at $94 million, Syracuse, $46 million and Pittsburgh, $27.5 million. Forbes Magazine said this was caused by not having a definitive home base and playing in two small arenas, Gampel in Storrs and the XL Arena in Hartford.There was also some news last week for the non-athlete students, who do stay on to graduate. Their tuition was increased 6.5 percent by the deficit-ridden university that has seen its state aid cut. Unlike the special train to the Garden, this was not announced by Governor Malloy.Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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